Re: [Gnewsense-dev] [bug #38001] Kernel metapackages (linux-latest-2.6) refer to missing Debian kernel versions

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:48:19 +0100
schreef Marek Buras <address@hidden>:

I believe you're talking about bug #37522?

> I also tried to check all patches with deblob-check script. It
> produced a list of 155 patches that contains code related to loading
> firmware from external files. They are not harmful in my opinion,
> since there are no blobs in gNS, but I think it's good idea to look
> at them just to be sure. If you are interested I can put the list
> somewhere with my comments included (I looked at some patches already
> but didn't have the time to go through all).

The request_firmware call tells the user which (potentially non-free)
firmware file Linux wants. That encourages users to go look for that
file and install it. The "/* DEBLOBBED */" solution is far from ideal,
but we assume that gNewSense users don't want to run non-free firmware
anyway, so being explicit about it and making it hard is better than
encouragement. The Linux-libre maintainer and Richard Stallman have
discussed [1] how to improve firmware handling, but as far as I know
those suggestions have not been implemented yet.

[1]
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2010-12/msg00033.html